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davekelly
Reviews
House on Haunted Hill (1999)
Shockingly Awful Waste of Film and Money!!
I saw the trailer for this film at the cinema and was impressed by the special effects. When i actually watched the film on DVD this week i soon realised that the decent special effects featured on the trailer were in fact the only special effects in the film. Though i quite like the original, i absolutely hated this movie, and if it is true that Dark Castle productions are indeed planning to remake a whole host of William Castle movies then i hope they do a better job! The script was perhaps the worst i have witnessed in a long time, the characters were all so instantly annoying that i found my self wishing them dead with in the first fifteen minutes. It actually took me two sittings to watch the movie, it was either that or i would have found myself fast forwarding through it. The plot, what there is of it, doesn't make much sense and the film doesn't explain why certain things are happening, Price's wifes relationship with one of the guests for example. This movie was so bad i ended up feeling frustrated and cheated, it actually made me so angry. Avoid this like the plague.
Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
A stylishly filmed tragedy even Shakespeare would be proud to have composed
In Leaving Las Vegas Mike Figgis composed a tragedy even Shakespeare would be proud of. Nic Cage, who deservedly won an Oscar for his performance and Elizabeth Shue give a new meaning to the phrase "hopeless romantics" as two lonely troubled people caught in a downward spiral of self loathing who fall in love in the most unlikely circumstances, Cage plays Ben who has driven to Las Vegas, having lost his job and his wife, to drink himself to death. Here he meets Shue's Sera, a bullied prostitute who takes Ben into her home. Whether through love or just the desire to be needed they embark on a relationship on the condition that he can not ask her to give up prostitution and in turn she can not ask him to stop drinking. Indeed a modern classic the film was based on the semi-autobiographical novel by John O'Brien, which in what was many ways a suicide note for the young author who committed suicide as soon as he had sold the rights to the film.